The Sod-House Frontier by Everett Dick

“The great calamity of the year 1874, however, surpassed anything before or since and caused such great damage that on the plains it is generally called the grasshopper year. The grasshoppers came suddenly. They traveled with a strong wind, coming with it and leaving with it. Rising high in the air with their wings spread, they were carried along with very little effort; they appeared from the North. Their ravages reached from the Dakotas to northern Texas and penetrated as far east as Sedalia, Missouri.
”At times the insects were four to six inches deep on the ground and continued to alight for hours. Men were obliged to tie strings around their pants legs to keep the pests from crawling up their legs. In the cool of the evening the hoppers gathered so thick on the warm rails of the railroad that the Union Pacific trains were stopped. Section men were called out to shovel the grasshoppers off the tracks near the spot where Kearney, Nebraska, now stands, so that the trains could get through. The track was so oily and greasy that the wheels spun and would not pull the train.”
”Every green thing except castor beans, cane, and native grass, and the leaves of certain native trees, was eaten. Onions seemed to have been a favorite food for the hoppers. They ate the tops and the onions right down into the ground to the end of the roots leaving little hollow holes where the succulent bulbs had been. One observer claimed in all seriousness that when a large number of these insects flew past his cabin door, their breath was rank with the odor of onions.”

-Everett Dick, 1937